Contemplating an Education System for Decolonization and Rejuvenation

By: Dr. Yusuf Progler
Any meaningful program of education for decolonization and rejuvenation has to take into account the damage already done by Western civilization, and must take steps to undo that damage, heal the wounds, and especially avoid repeating its reprehensible and destructive characteristics in a new guise. Such a prospectus requires a two-pronged approach, which will simultaneously dismantle the destructive tendencies and institutions built upon them, and assemble more constructive beliefs and practices, in light of human and ecological needs.
Western civilization has hegemonic control over three areas of existence: cosmology, epistemology, and methodology. A meaningful program of decolonization and rejuvenation will need to weave these three together, not compartmentalize them, into a program of study whose goal is a sustainable, peaceful and just life for as many humans as possible.
Since western bodies of knowledge are intertwined with method, it seems necessary to come up with new methods. Otherwise, 'non-western' systems may merely add some exotic frills to otherwise essentially western systems. Western methodologies will probably be the most difficult to overcome, since many people who are talking about decolonization are doing so from within western institutions.
A necessary step away from this hegemonic system is to legitimize peoples whose cosmological, epistemological and methodological legitimacy is not based solely on their having passed through the hierarchical system of education in the west, whose highest award is the Ph.D. Difficult although this may seem, the program of rejuvenation will need to start by downgrading the Ph.D. and similar colonial certificates from their places of privilege. Even a cursory look at the history of colonization will bear this out, as the white man worked to set up institutions of legitimization, with their rewards and punishments, and these systems preceded their bodies and frameworks of knowledge.
Where does this leave institutions of higher education? Clearly some will adjust, and others will not. The ones that do adjust to the program of decolonization and rejuvenation will survive in a world driven by peace, justice and sustainable living, and the ones that cannot do so will wither and fade away. The danger lies in forming alliances, because of economic or political expediencies, with existing institutions, because their colonizing habits will severely limit progress in the kinds of projects most needed for genuine and meaningful decolonization and rejuvenation.
>From agriculture to child-rearing and medicine, and within the realms of politics, economics and science, wide-ranging efforts need to persevere in elucidating the nature of the destructive systems and replacing them with more sustainable systems. Much of this will entail looking at workable models on the ground, keeping in mind that the best workable models of peaceful and just sustainable survival are context- and bioregion-specific, worked out within the means and locales of specific cultural and ecological settings, and being wary of universalized, standardized and westernized systems.
The Project on Andean Technology (PRATEC) deserves such study. Its developers created a program of decolonization and rejuvenation that evaluated western knowledges and methodologies from a baseline Andean cosmological system. The designers and practitioners of PRATEC speak of 'eating, digesting, and excreting' the western knowledges and methodologies, in an interesting twist on the usual rigid dichotomy of acceptance or rejection found in westernized oppositions to colonization, such as Marxism and liberalism.
Once the Andean cosmological system was understood, it became a matter of evaluating knowledges and methodologies in terms of a baseline set of assumptions. In this scheme, people with western Ph.D.'s actually played the role of mediators; they were on the front lines with the western development 'experts', disputing their plans and projects in their own language, having digested the western ways of seeing and being able to explain them back to their designers in ways that could not be easily written off, before rejecting them in light of local needs and beliefs. In this light, there is still a role for the Ph.D., though it is more of a mediating role than an authoritative role.
Similar workable alternatives could be studied as well, for the ways in which they combine a two-pronged approach to the decolonization and rejuvenation project, with respect to locally relevant types of knowledge and experience. So any meaningful education in this sense will require a field-based component, which in a sense undermines another tenet of western education: book learning. This is not to reject books, but only to say that their knowledges need to be worked out by people, and so studying the ways people apply and enact their knowledge systems, for better or worse, is a necessary part of the project. With these cautionary remarks in mind, some 'courses' in a program of decolonization and rejuvenation might include the following:
'Civilization and Sustainability' can examine the ways in which civilizations have collapsed once they strayed too far outside the bounds of their bioregions. This course will treat the Western notion of civilization as problematic in light of non-Western cosmologies, and look at what might count for a 'civilization' in an ecologically-sustainable cultural setting. Studying the relationships between mental and environmental ecologies will be necessary to develop a conceptual framework for the course.
'Comparative Studies in Cosmology, Epistemology, and Methodology' can evaluate western and non-western views on these topics, in light of the findings from studies of civilization and sustainability. Cosmological studies can look at the three-part relationship between human beings and the unseen world, human beings within and among themselves, and human beings within a seen world or an environment. Knowledge studies can look at indigenous definitions of knowledge, and evaluate various knowledges as an antidote to the colonial educational systems that have insisted on a singular definition of knowledge as that which benefits the colonized way of life and its beneficiaries. Studies in methodology can proceed from the above, by looking at how methodologies can embody cosmologies and epistemologies.
'Explorations in Other-than-Human Sovereignty' can ask the basic question of what happens when human beings are not the sovereign of the land. Whether it be in a deity and revealed religion, as in for example the Islamic sense of sovereignty, or in nature being the sovereign, as in many indigenous people's cosmologies, such a course will pose major challenges to the humanistic western system of thought, which places the human being at the center of a rational universe. In order to avoid reproducing past pathologies, however, this course of study will need to look at how many belief systems, such as contemporary forms of Judaism and Christianity in the west, have embraced humanism at the expense of their cosmological teachings; this in itself will also complicate efforts at purely relativistic studies and conversations, such as in interfaith dialogues.
'Psychology of Consumption' will, at the risk of being colonized by the jargon and norms of western psychology, take to task the
electronically-mediated environments of western consumer culture, and evaluate its effects on local cultures. This will involve fieldwork and counselling, with the intention of drawing connections between consumerism and non-sustainability, and asking basic questions about how much is enough, and what people really need to be happy.
Many more courses of study along these lines could be proposed for a new kind of education, perhaps involving an institution with a new name ('poliversity'?), which may not even meet the western criteria of an educational experience, with its campuses, certificates and hierarchies. The key issue will remain whether or not it is possible to have an educational system that, seemingly paradoxically but perhaps only temporarily, will have as one of its goals its own demise. This will remain a paradox for as long as the western norms of thought and action form the basis for non-western allegiances, which can only be made clear once a program is developed with a sense of simultaneous decolonization and rejuvenation in view.